Louvre Director Resigns After Security Lapses and Scams
Louvre Museum Director Laurence des Cars resigned on 24 February, less than five months after a brazen theft of $100 million worth of historical jewelry put the Louvre’s security in the spotlight.
French President Emmanual Macron accepted des Cars’s resignation “as an act of responsibility at a time when the world’s largest museum needs both stability and a strong new impetus to successfully complete major security and modernization projects,” Macron’s office said in a statement.
Des Cars was appointed to the director position in 2021, and she championed plans to revitalize and renovate the Louvre. Unfortunately, a focus on new acquisitions supplanted security improvements in some cases, leaving gaps open that criminals leveraged to steal the jewelry on 19 October 2025. Des Cars offered to resign on the day of the robbery, but her resignation at the time was refused by the culture minister, according to the Associated Press (AP).
Other misfortunes under des Cars’s watch included water damage to antique books, the forced closing of a gallery because of structural weaknesses, a number of strikes by museum workers (including over security and understaffing concerns), and the discovery of a decade-long ticket fraud scam that cost the museum nearly $12 million, The New York Times reported.
After the heist, the Louvre ramped up its security upgrade timeline, including new surveillance coverage and the installation of anti-intrusion systems. But for des Cars, the damage was likely already done.
In an interview last year with the Times, des Cars acknowledged that the burglary “is a wound that I will certainly carry all my life,” but that she had tried during her tenure to boost museum security and structural issues at the former royal palace.
Des Cars told French newspaper Le Figaro that she had tried to steer the Louvre through the fallout from the heist, but concluded that she couldn’t carry out the museum’s necessary transformation and deep reform in the current climate. She said that, as museum director, she needed to serve as the lightning rod and resign so that the Louvre could move forward.
Art historian and veteran museum director Christophe Leribault was tapped today to take over the director position at the Louvre, the AP reported. Leribault has been serving as director for the Versailles Palace, and he used to head up the Orsay Museum in Paris.
